Custard Creams

This week I had every intention of making pork pies as made on last weeks comic relief bake off. However, I decided to delay that bake by a week as my brother in law who is partial to a pork pie is visiting at the weekend so he will be able to sample them and give some constructive feedback as a self proclaimed 'pie expert'. Come back this time next week for the recipe.

Not wanting to go a week without baking something, I thought I'd do something quick and easy (but still tasty!). This is a good recipe to have in your reportire if you fancy a quick bake and a recipe that you'll most likely already have all of the ingredients for.

It's a toss up between custard creams and bourbon creams as to which wins the title of best biscuit in my eyes but as I'm not eating chocolate until July and my Mum has given up chocolate for the month of March for the British Heart Foundation, I opted to make the former.

To make approximately 25 custard creams you will need:

Top tip - cover your mixer with a tea towel
 to stop icing sugar going everywhere when mixing!

For the biscuit:

200g unsalted butter

100g caster sugar

100g custard powder

200g plain flour

1tsp vanilla essence

For the custard cream filling:

300g icing sugar

150g unsalted butter

50g custard powder

A drop of milk (if you want)

To make the biscuits:

• Cream the butter and the sugar together until light and fluffy.
• Add the vanilla, flour and sugar and combine until it starts to form a dough - you'll need to get your hands in at this point to combine the mixture into a nice smooth dough.
• Wrap the dough in cling film and chill for about 30 minutes. Towards the end of the chilling time preheat your oven to 180c fan.

Whilst the dough chills you can make the butter cream by mixing all of the ingredients together. Set it aside until you need it.

The butter cream is quite stiff for this recipe (think about shop brought custard creams how you can peel the filling off). It sounds odd but to fill by custard creams I actually rolled my butter cream between two sheets of baking paper (sprinkled with icing sugar) and then used a cutter of a similar size to my biscuits to cut the filling to size and sandwich the biscuits together. If you want a looser filling just add a drop of milk when making your icing which will allow you to pipe it out more easily.

• After  your dough has chilled for half an hour, take your biscuit dough out of the fridge and on a lightly floured surface roll it out to approximately 3mm thick. 
• Using a cutter of your choosing, cut out an even number of biscuit pieces. If necessary put the off cuts back together to re roll - only do this once as the more you work your dough the more this will impact on your biscuit.

I have a custard cream stamp with I brought from baker and maker (see below picture) which puts the traditional pattern onto the biscuits. You don't have to get one of these and you can make them any size and shape you want.

Pop your biscuits on a baking tray and chill for another 10 minutes before baking for 10-12 minutes.

Allow the biscuits to cool before sandwiching them between your butter cream filling.

That's all there is too it!

Happy baking, let me know how you get in.

Rach x